Ballmer’s comments at a partners event suggest that ten months after its launch, Windows Phone 7 still hasn’t generated any significant sales figures to report. In January LG said that WP7 had not had a flying start, although Microsoft claimed to have sold 1.5 million phones with the OS in the first six weeks. Problems with ‘phantom’ data using up bandwidth also took the shine off WP7’s image.
Still, WP7 has some things going for it – and not just the alliance with Nokia. The latter is an alliance of two major players seeing their market strength erode and hoping that their cooperation will bring together the best of two worlds. While the deal will sharply increase the sales potential for WP7, Nokia still has a lot of ground to make up on the smartphone market and WP7 has yet to achieve much.
The sales potential of WP7 also depends for a large part on players such as Samsung and HTC, both popular brands at the moment. Both have committed to launching Windows phones in addition to Android handsets (and Bada phones in Samsung’s case). The combination of Nokia, Samsung, HTC and LG (and possibly also Sony Ericsson) offers a significant counterweight to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, creating a third big player in mobile OS. The Android manufacturers will profit from the additional channel to fight iOS and the bigger audience beyond just Android.
Microsoft’s scale and reach means it will also be able to pump a great deal of money into the exponentially growing mobile market. It’s also built up a significant expertise based on its previous OS, Windows Mobile. This puts it ahead of RIM (less scale) and HP/Palm (less expertise), which are less likely to have everything they need in house to make their mobile products a success. This also makes Windows more attractive for app developers.
The combination of its immense scale, the alliance with a still strong player on the handset market and the interest from other handset makers for an alternative OS gives WP7 the basis to grow into a success. However, that success is far from certain. Microsoft has shown in the recent past – think Windows Vista – that it’s also able to seriously fail.
